The day the planet will finally discover whether the machine built to recreate the big bang will uncover the secrets of the universe or bring about the end of the world has been put off for two months.
The £5bn Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border built to smash protons together at velocities just below the speed of light, began operating amid great fanfare earlier this month.
However, only 36 hours into the project, the Cern (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) machine was found to have a fault and shut down.
Today a spokesman for Cern, James Gillies, said that the damage is worse than previously believed and will halt operations for two months.
It had been thought the results of the experiment would be known by the end of the year.
Scientists leading the project hope to be able to recreate conditions immediately after the big bang and provide answers to key questions on the composition of the universe. They have dismissed predictions by a tiny but vocal group of opponents that the experiment could create a black hole which would swallow the planet.
It is believed that the damage was caused when super-cooled helium escaped because of a faulty electrical connection between two magnets in the massive machine.
The sector that was damaged will have to be slowly warmed up to well above absolute zero over a number of weeks so that repairs can be made.
Giles said: "It's too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out."
The collider, two decades in the making, is the world's largest atom smasher. It fires beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms around the tunnels at nearly the speed of light.
It then causes the protons to collide, revealing how the tiniest particles were first created after the big bang, the massive explosion physicists believe formed the universe.
Cern announced on Thursday that it had shut down the collider after a successful startup that had beams of protons circling in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions.
It was at first thought the failure of an electrical transformer that handles part of the cooling was the problem, Cern said. That transformer was replaced last weekend and the machine was lowered back to operating temperature to prepare for operations to be resumed.
It was then that scientists found the problem was worse than initially believed.